tech
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I can’t decide. It’s Any.do for now, as of February 25, 2013. Wunderlist has great native apps on most platforms, both mobile and PC, but Any.do is the best mobile solution I’ve found, and that’s where I really need a task manager. ↩
Tumblr, Yahoo, and Ads That Don't Suck
Here’s a semi-article, in that it’s more like a rant, but certainly not a link post. If you’ve seen similar stuff in your dashboard, feel free to let me know.
Dear Marissa and David,
Joe here. I’ve used all of Tumblr’s competitors extensively and I settled on Tumblr because it’s mindfully-designed, community-focused, and dead simple. The lack of ads helped, but more important to me than services with no ads are services that do have ads at least respecting their users enough to have decent ads.
So.
Keep ads for The Bachelorette out of my dashboard feed. Please consider presenting users with relevant ads. Scan my blog, the tags i use, the words I like, the stuff I link to. After all, you own it. So look at it. Run it through an algorithm and spit out some sort of value which you can key to a set of sponsored posts that, based on their weighted relevance to my interests and the things I cover on my blog, may actually be interesting to me. This is more palatable to users and more valuable to advertisers than showing me some random woman running around on the beach.
Over and over again.
Despite my never clicking it or reblogging it or seeing it without making an angry face and swearing never to watch that goddamn show. This dashboard spam does not bode well for Tumblr’s future at Yahoo, and that makes me sad, because I like Tumblr, and I rather like both of your styles, to the extent I can know anything about them from reading things on the Internet or watching you do interviews.
You said you wouldn’t fuck this up, but the glut of sponsored posts in my feed tonight about something I’ve never given any corner of the web any reason to think I care about suggests otherwise. Turn it around while you still can.
Change Yahoo, change Tumblr a bit if you must, but why not change advertising and the typically adversarial relationship between advertisers and target audiences while you’re at it?
in other words, don’t shove bad ads in our faces. If we wanted that we would turn on the TV or some other medium that can only collect data in really clumsy inaccurate old ways.
You’ve disrupted plenty of things, why not this?
If you ever want more advice, get in touch. I’ve got lots of ideas.
Sincerely, Joe Ross
German railroad mulling anti-graffiti drones
German railroad mulling anti-graffiti drones
With US authorities pushing for easier backdoors into electronic communications systems, a network of anti-graffiti drones looks like a good front for general state-wide surveillance. The German privacy ethic runs deep, but it may provide an interesting model for US authorities to consider in the long-term.
Strongbox and Aaron Swartz: Open source, anonymous tips
Strongbox and Aaron Swartz: Open source, anonymous tips
There is plenty of Google news today coming out of their annual I/O conference, but this looks far more important and big-picture, if it actually gets used.
DARPA and deep learning
This article by Daniela Hernandez at Wired is well-done and fascinating. However, this bit most caught my eye:
Half of the $100 million in federal funding allotted to this program will come from Darpa — more than the amount coming from the National Institutes of Health — and the Defense Department’s research arm hopes the project will “inspire new information processing architectures or new computing approaches.”
Make no mistake: the US military wants intelligent killing machines.
Obama May Back F.B.I. Plan to Wiretap Web Users
Obama May Back F.B.I. Plan to Wiretap Web Users
Charlie Savage of The New York Times:
the new proposal focuses on strengthening wiretap orders issued by judges. Currently, such orders instruct recipients to provide technical assistance to law enforcement agencies, leaving wiggle room for companies to say they tried but could not make the technology work. Under the new proposal, providers could be ordered to comply, and judges could impose fines if they did not.
Concerns that this would prompt similar measures from repressive governments abroad are not overblown. If we expect foreign companies to submit to these procedures, their governments will expect US companies to do the same. I’m surprised this article doesn’t mention anything about what the Obama administration’s diplomats and international law folks think about all of this.
Netflix launch reduces BitTorrent use
Netflix launch reduces BitTorrent use
Joe Hanlon of TechRadar:
Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos says that there is a correlation between the Netflix launching in a country and BitTorrent traffic slowing down in the same region.
If you stream it, they will pay.
The next generation of Instapaper
The next generation of Instapaper
Marco Arment has turned control of his read-it-later service, Instapaper, over to incubator-turned-company-in-its-own-right Betaworks:
I’m happy to announce that I’ve sold a majority stake in Instapaper to Betaworks. We’ve structured the deal with Instapaper’s health and longevity as the top priority, with incentives to keep it going well into the future. I will continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operations, expand its staff, and develop it further.
What’s really intriguing about this is that the Betaworks website includes the following teaser:
Want early access to the new Instapaper and other products we build and invest in? Join Openbeta.
I wonder whether the “new Instapaper” is already in the works, or this is just a clever marketing ploy to get Instapaper fans signed up for Betaworks’ Openbeta mailing list.
All in all, Instapaper is an amazing product, and if Betaworks’ reanimation of Digg is any indication, they’re a good custodian.
Why carriers should be more worried than Google about Facebook Home
Why carriers should be more worried than Google about Facebook Home
Ellis Hamburger, writing at The Verge:
Mirroring its rollout of free VoIP calling for iOS, Facebook has updated its Messenger app for Android to allow free calling for users in the US.
I think this is Facebook’s true sleight of hand: everyone is looking at Home and how they’re taking over the launcher and Android. Meanwhile they’re backdooring this VoIP technology that lets you call people using only wifi.
Facebook is asserting its primacy in the minds of millions of mobile users not only to dominate Android, but to put itself in a solid position to dominate carriers as well. Simple, user-friendly VoIP: one of the biggest and potentially most profound opportunities Google ever missed with Android.
Want to learn to code? Start here.
Want to learn to code? Start here.
Zack Shapiro offers some great advice for those interested in learning to code as a means to build something. I’m one of those people he mentions who are using Code Academy but I make it a part of my weekly routine and it’s helping.
I wrote a post almost a year ago about how code relates to the law, and I stand by it: it’s a great way of learning to think critically. Even if you don’t learn to build what you have in mind, you’ll get some useful lessons out of the experience.
Facebook To Reveal “Home On Android”
Facebook To Reveal “Home On Android”
I predict Facebook will announce a custom Android launcher — a “home” screen.
Update April 4, 2013: I was right.
Yahoo: The Marissa Mayer Turnaround
Yahoo: The Marissa Mayer Turnaround
Jean-Louis Gassée consistently provides insight and, perhaps even more importantly in today’s tech-writing landscape, truly elegant prose. This is a great write-up, but I recommend you make Monday Note one of your weekly reads. He and Frédéric Filloux are often voices of reason among the din of unqualified opinion.
HBO CEO wants to bundle HBO GO with your internet subscription
Twitter kills TweetDeck, announces it on Posterous, which they're also killing
Twitter kills TweetDeck, announces it on Posterous, which they’re also killing
I admit, squeezing the entire post into the title is lazy, but at least it’s informative. I’ll link to Twitter’s death notice for Posterous and call it a post.
Evernote CEO hints at future task management integration
Evernote CEO hints at future task management integration
Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, talking to Lifehacker:
What’s your favorite to-do list manager?
You know, I don’t actually have one. I use Evernote, which isn’t particularly great for to-dos yet. Yet.
Despite having tried every task management app I can find, and settling on Wunderlist1Any.do for now, I’m very excited about an integrated Evernote task management solution.
The Verge picks the best reads of 2012
The Verge picks the best reads of 2012
This is a great list, and includes only a few that missed, which probably means I read too much about tech. But what I particularly like about it is that most of the stories would appeal in one way or another to even to “normals”who don’t obsessively follow the technology industry.
More House of Representatives data available in XML
More House of Representatives data available in XML
O’Reilly's Alex Howard reports that both House floor summaries and bulk downloads of all House legislation are now available in XML. It doesn't mean everything Congress does is available yet, but it’s a great progression.
I really hope some enterprising developers make something cool with the newly-available data streams, and future offerings as well. I propose an app that provides push notifications when keywords of your choice are mentioned on the House floor.
TechCrunch's John Biggs on how to cover the Consumer Electronics Show
TechCrunch’s John Biggs on how to cover the Consumer Electronics Show
John Biggs, in a great post at TechCrunch about how they approached their CES 2013 coverage:
But when you take a step back and look at CES from an innovation standpoint, and with the expectation that the big money here makes the most noise but the small guys here make the most sense, then you’ve got a different show. There’s some really cool stuff here. We tried to celebrate that.
Go give it a read.